


Плохому танцору всегда яйца мешают

by Catznetsov



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, M/M, Rule 63, implied/referenced Sergei Federov/Sasha Semin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-01-16 21:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21277892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: Every company tells its own stories. Alex is with the Washington Ballet for a year before he starts to believe them.“Didn’t he give up ballet?” Nicolette says under her breath and a mass of runaway curls.“No, didn’t he join the army, or like, whatever you call it?” Mikayla says.“He got lost in the airport,” Sergei says over them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pr_scatterbrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/gifts).

> Dear pr_scatterbrain:  
This is my favorite prompt, except for all your others. Writing about ballet was awfully fun, and I hope that comes through for you! Thank you to the exchange moderators for all their work. 
> 
> Since this was written for someone familiar with Swan Lake, I've added a couple notes on the ballet for other readers in ch.2.

Every company tells its own stories. Alex is with the Washington Ballet for a year before he starts to believe them.

“Didn’t he give up ballet?” Nicolette says under her breath and a mass of runaway curls.

“No, didn’t he join the army, or like, whatever you call it?” Mikayla says.

“He got lost in Heathrow,” Sergei says over them. “Alex? He needed to change flights and the last bus already left, so I’m going to the airport now. I’m sorry about our practice time, can you run Siegfried with Olga please?”

Alex says, ”Okay,” and finishes fixing Nicki’s bun quickly with a scrunchie before weaving his way between his friends and up to the front of the studio where his principal is tapping one irritable pink toe. “Hello, Olie.”

“If you drop me, you’ll never dance at more than a karaoke bar off the Beltway again,” Olie says, and hauls him down to kiss his cheeks just like always. When Mikayla turns up the clunky old CD player Alex lets his own weight sink down his thighs to the balls of his feet into the floor, spreads his hands and feels the powerful bellows of her ribs fit against them, only glancing for a moment at Nicki. They’re staying late after daily classes so he can workshop the role with Sergei, and she and Mikayla can study Odette with Olie, before preseason rehearsals really hit their stride. If Olie doesn’t feel she has to correct Alex too much, the women can still do that, but then Alex is going to spend the evening lifting, more mechanic than character.

Last year Alex would have lit up to have Sergei trust his interpretation, but looking between Nicki and Micki’s careful ballet smiles he doesn’t think anyone’s sure that’s what’s happening, or if, just a little bit, Sergei’s caring less.

Sergei comes to class the next morning 15 minutes later than his chronic half an hour early, with a new bright shadow.

Alexander Valeryevich is supposed to replace Sergei, one day. It’s strange and strained because Alex is supposed to replace him, or he was, two years ago, or will be, maybe, after this season.

“Is it going to be weird he’s taking your name too?” Micki whispers, digging her knee into his thigh as they warm up on neighboring yoga matts.

“Makayla, McKayla, Michelle, and boy Michel just in the corps,” Alex points out, pressing down into his stretch. In the mirror, he can see Sergei introducing the new danseur to the ballet master at the head of the room, Sergei’s hands moving in short swift gestures as he speaks. Gabby nods at what Sergei’s saying a couple times, and then tips her face up to talk to the new guy, patting a hand on his arm. Her little stocky outline almost vanishes behind his slouch.

“Sure, but are any of them more fuckable than me?” Micki says, as Gabby snaps for their attention.

“Pack it in, kids. Some of you remember but if you don’t, this is Alexander, coming back to us from the Alexandrov. Sergei tells me that’s not confusing at all.”

“What?” Alex says, sitting upright and then almost wobbling over.

“For our upcoming season of Swan Lake he’ll probably be understudying Sergei, and split half of the midweek nights, and maybe the latter season if Feds finally retires on me, with our Alex. Pick nicknames now, boys. His bag is somewhere in London, find some flats for class and someone show him down to Costume later, please.”

There’s a flutter of polite applause and everyone scuffles back to their favorite spots along the barres like a flock of pigeons, scattering and reforming around any small obstacle tossed into their routine. The new Alexander stays blinking at Gabby for a beat too long as someone turns up the warmup music, and then pats at his face a few times like a cat and slinks to the free end of a barre. Between the forest of pale leggings Alex can see flickers as he grips the barre with golden hands, fingers flexing, and sinks into a split. No one ends up remembering his shoes.

He follows Sergei to workshop that night, padding in after Alex and the danseuses have all gathered and begun fucking around with scraps of choreography. Alex focuses his attention back on the moment in motion, Nicki’s thick waist and shoulders in front of him, the way he does when the lights are on them, but as soon as her weight leaves his hands as they pause to rest he’s looking at those white socks again.

They all had watched him all the way through the daily class, but Alexander Valeryevich hadn’t done anything more interesting than wear socks to stretch and then idly toe them off as Gabby was demonstrating the day’s steps, pressing up from that flat-footed slouch and rolling over the balls of his feet to balance on the triangle of his toes unsupported, perfect high demipointe. He slipped them back on again after class to pad away, and now he’s standing listening to whatever Sergei says Olie’s saying, shifting over and over from heel to toe. Alex thinks it’s a bit of a ridiculously soft look for someone’s whose hair is still cropped military short.

“Alex?” Sergei says, distracted again, or maybe Alex just missed the moment when Sergei was looking for his attention. “That’s looking great. Could you run down and show Sasha where to grab some new Blochs, please? I’ll go over the end of the pas de deux with Nicolette.”

Alex flexes his fingers in the bow of Nicki’s scratchy pink wraparound warmup sweater at the small of her back, until she reaches discreetly around and pries him off. “Okay,” he says, and when he starts walking Sasha Valeryevich shadows him down the hall on silent socked feet just as easily.

It’s late and lights in the theater’s back rooms are low, but Alex jimmies the lock the way Sergei taught him to and lets them into the shoe closet. Sasha Valeryevich surveys them very seriously, picking first one pair then another out of the bins and blinking at the labels before he finds what seems to be his size and simply sits down on the floor to try them on.

Alex supervises, arms crossed. “You didn’t really lose your shoes in London, did you?” he has to ask in Russian. A suitcase, maybe, checked baggage rerouted, but he can’t imagine traveling without at least a pair in arm’s reach.

“Not really,” Sasha Valeryevich says, lacing one and looking up at him. “Stealing from the Army seemed like a bad idea.” He ties up the other, long hands meditative over the laces, and then his face folds and blooms into a smile. “At least after I did it.”

“Alex don’t mean it really,” Nicki is whispering to Micki when they get back to the practice room. Sergei and Olie have their heads together, reading choreography. There’s no reason the younger danseuses have to yield them the center of the room, cuddling together on their mats at the edge of some invisible circle like a very small kindergarten class, but Alex understands why they’d want to. “He’s just angry because he’s worry about if he gets principal roles after this season and the new guy. Your hair is _so_ better than boy Michel’s.”

“We’re back,” Alex announces, and then has to check that Sasha Valeryevich is really behind him and hadn’t stumbled into a side-hallway somewhere between here and the basement. There’s not a lot of difference between his presence and his absence, which is ironic, given how much both might turn out to have wrecked Alex’s career.

Nicki gives him a pointed look from under her extended leg and lowers it, straightening her spine. Alex steps over her toes to the barre on the back wall and steadies himself with both feet on the floor, both hands warm on the brass. He’s being managed, but his partner gets to do that, and Nicki and Alex are going to lead the company together someday. Everyone’s been telling that story.

Sasha Valeryevich steps up to the barre next to him. In the pause between beats of Micki’s warmup track Alex looks over at him, but he’s only tipped his face to the mirror, eyes on the reflection of his own hands. Alex still looks down to check his form no matter how many ballet masters have rapped his knuckles for it. But Sasha is watchingthe image with wide icy eyes as if it’s only a window between him and the dancer on the other side. It makes Alex remember frost on his own nose, pressed against a shopfront’s glass one winter, his mother’s voice somewhere trying to lure him on past the display of televisions where the radiant little figure of Nureyev had crackled and thrown sparks.

Alex’s mouth is open as if he’ll taste Moscow air when he breathes, or maybe he’d thought to say something, but he doesn’t. Sergei wakes up from his notes enough to call one of their names.

Nicki pulls on his hand, so Alex goes.

Siegfried is not a breathtaking role, to see or to dance. As far as Alex is concerned the human prince is a tool to tell the swan princess’ story, and a bit of a dick. The leaps are well within his athletic range, and the step sequences don’t strain his memory. But the role is there to elevate Nicki, and that more than anything, Alex can do.

“Very good,” Sergei says softly, when Alex’s breath catches and Nicki’s stands steady in front of him again. Tchaikovsky’s pas de deux peters out and then the next movement starts to grow; Micki clicks it off. Sasha Valeryevich claps.

When Alex looks he’s sitting on a mat at Olie and Sergei’s feet, ankles crossed in his new black shoes, and then he must realize what he just did wasn’t proper ballet. His hands dart to his mouth and then to hide, tucked under his knees, covering the tips of those shoes. It’s a gesture so useless that Alex has to scuff his own feet against the floor, abruptly ashamed.

“Hey,” he says once they wrap for the night and the others are packing their bags. Outside the windows the sky is sinking toward the deepest blue, and Alex can see their reflections echoed back and forth between the mirrors and the dark glass. Sasha startles up at him, looking more surprised to see Alex than at the prospect of being left in an empty practice room. Alex has the sudden vision of him sleeping here, under a nest of mats. “Do you want to get food?”

They go to McDonald’s, because Alex is aching with growing pains again and doesn’t know what else to do. Alex grits his teeth and stares down the menu items, starting to translate them for him, until Sasha shrugs and says, “You just choose,” and then they sit in some booth in the corner as Alex watches him eat a hash brown for the first time.

“Have you ever danced Siegfried before?” Alex asks, as Sasha tests the potato with the pink tip of his tongue. He gets another shrug.

“I like yours, though,” Sasha says. “You dance as if he is the one enchanted by her.” And Alex should have learned better by now, learned from his missteps every time a teacher or ballet master has given him a note, that he’s no good at talking about his own ballet.

“Oh. Well, Nicki, you know,” he says, and Sasha nods solemnly to that before fitting the hash brown into his mouth whole. Alex coughs on his coke laughing, and learns that Sasha’s laugh can stop a room cold, even muffled through potato.

Sasha’s bag clears customs somehow a week later, as they’re starting to rehearse on the partially built set, and sure enough his old dance shoes are sitting on top when he drops it on the stage and unzips it.

“I can keep the others, though, yes?” he asks Alex.

“They’re from Costume for us to use, of course,” Alex says. It’s the most Russian question he’s asked since Alex admitted he doesn’t know how crosswalks in America decide it’s safe to go, and then had to haul him back from walking into a city bus. Then he looks at what Sasha’s holding up.

They’re knee-high black leather boots.

“They haven’t changed that costume in a hundred years, have they,” Sergei says, whistling as he walks by between the peaks of unpainted plywood. Sasha tips his face up to look at him instead of moving back, and then shrugs, dropping both boots back into their nest of olive green.

“You don’t dance in those,” Micki says in delighted English, dragging Jonna and Jane with her from a cluster of the corps.

Sasha sets his sharp chin and turns from watching Sergei to them. “Do too,” he says back, and spoils any effect by laughing.

Alex’s memories start late, maybe five or six years old, which means he can’t imagine two years without ballet. He doesn’t have to. Sasha untucks his feet from under him and shoots upright, bouncing on his toes as he calls after Sergei. Alex helps clear the straggling early-morning members of the corp into circle, just shrugging his shoulders when Nicki lays a questioning hand on his. Sasha is taking both of Sergei’s wrists to tug him in to center stage, then forgetting, dropping them to dart back and pull his boots on one at a time.

They should look silly over soft blue jeans already straining certain seams, or maybe they do. Alex will have to ask Nicki for reassurance later.

Sergei rolls his eyes and then draws out the expression with his hands, palms opened up and then pointing down to his own feet still in ordinary black Bloch slippers. Sasha rebalances on both feet and sticks a hand out, fluttering it at him. He mimics Sergei’s elegantly draped ballet hand, fingers gently arrondi, then flicks his fingertips out sharply allongé, then makes a fist.

Alex pokes Nicki, who steps on his foot, and then realizes he might want something and pokes Jonna, who looks drowsily around. When he prods at her thick biceps she gets the message and starts clapping with cupped palms, the way that pops like a gunshot and she likes to do in the back row whenever Gabby’s speeches run long. She keeps perfect time as Sergei and Sasha face each other, and then Sasha bounces two steps forward, kicking off with the heels of his boots and pointing his toes up like a little boy, skips a third, and takes off running.

Ballet began like other soldiers’ dances in the army, as a way for Italian noblemen to show off their powerful thighs. Louis XIV, who brought the passion for it to France, practiced every day and composed ballets where each member of the court played a celestial role as he danced the sun, mostly to show up his little brother Philipp, who once poured oatmeal in the king’s hair.

The dowager queen and the first minister of France Cardinal Mazarin forbade Philipp from studying military strategy and encouraged him to wear dresses to seem like less of a threat. Philipp cheerfully did both. The Cardinal encouraged his seven tall dark and lovely nieces to distract the king, and his nephew to deflower the prince.

Perhaps Philipp could have told them that this wasn’t a strong strategy, given the nephew was captain of the King’s Musketeers, and the prince was very interested in learning to use a sword too. But he didn’t, and a very satisfied Philipp became France’s military sweetheart, while Louis spent hours a day at the barre developing his calf muscles in frustration.

Alex admires Prince Philipp, but Nicki tells him he’s more like the nephew hoping for official permission to love someone better than he is, and that she isn’t going to help him review for his MFA in Teaching Dance anymore.

It wasn’t until the next century that Marie Taglioni turned her physical strength intoa self-obscuring art, pushing herself up to look like she floated and creating the lovely high position of the arms that frames the danseuse’s face and starts to ache immediately. Today Romantic ballet shapes the dancers’ straining effort to look like there isn’t any, so the audience can feel as if they’ve slipped easily into a dream.

Russian dance still wants to knock out everyone involved.

Sasha and Sergei transcribe the circle in traveling leaps, each exactingly even in length until Sergei tightens his and Sasha follows, spiraling in but bouncing higher and higher until Sergei’s pointedly out-flung arm clips his side and Sasha falls over backward in mock surprise.

He times it to throw out a hand and tap the ground with the beat, bouncing back up again and into Sergei’s chest, which gives Sergei an excuse to spin away. Sergei pirouettes to turn, and then tosses off several high and tight spinning jumps. Sasha claps with the rest of them, and then when Sergei stops to breathe he taps his heel smartly on the stage again, then kicks it up into the air and starts spinning too.

It’s enough to make Sergei applaud politely back, and then start laughing when Sasha makes as many jumps as he did with the added strain of the high leg and then playacts being sick of spinning and simply stops. Sergei steps forward and pulls back, exaggerated, until Sasha waves him on.

He starts another series of spinning jumps, and Jonna doesn’t need to be prodded to pick up the pace as he drags them faster and higher. But when he’s almost finished a circle aiming to bump Sasha, Sasha falls sideways, meeting the floor with one hand only to arch up to his feet and fall again, all the way around the circle. Sergei opens his arms pretending to catch him up, and then shoves instead. It’s another act with no force behind it, but Sasha reads and partners it perfectly, throwing himself in the right direction to sell the performance.

Alex catches him, hands fitting over his ribs, muscles hot and sides straining, and lifts him like he’s done a thousand times for Nicki, the one thing that feels natural, if never easy. Sasha breathes into it, lets himself be caught and lifted back onto his toes, touching just for a moment before pushing off from Alex’s hands into another series of high traveling leaps, this time kicking out into a full split in midair.

“We’ve talked about that noise, Ms. Carlson!” Gabby yells, and then comes through the wings fully to see them. “Oh, children and Sergei. If we might dance some fucking ballet now?”

When Sasha dances Siegfried, he kicks up each step a little of the same way. When he has to be en pointe, or is told to transition through leaps more cleanly, he does it. But he always comes back to traveling with a bouncing walk, almost skipping, heels dug in and toes pointing to the sky, a little thing that makes the prince seem sweeter, if not less stupid, like a boy running out to meet the world and finding a sadness too big for him in it.

“Did you miss it?” Alex asks him. It’s night again, the lights of Ballston’s shopfronts fogging out the stars but a first few fluffy snowflakes replacing them. Alex is clutching his gear bag in front of his chest, the weight of it on his belly, not because he’s cold but because he feels like he’s always hungry.

Sasha is investigating their options for post-practice snacks, peeking in the windows of a pizza place and a Chinese restaurant, which Alex had been a little let down to learn he’s already familiar with, since as Sasha puts it, Krasnoyarsk is closer to China than to Moscow and doesn’t mind the distance. What Sasha does or doesn’t know or care about is a guessing game, and Alex likes winning, but then he doesn’t know if he does when it means he has one less thing left to show Sasha. “What?” Sasha says.

Alex shrugs, likes he’s already forgotten.

“I got drafted,” Sasha says. “They wouldn’t waive it, so, you know.” Alex shrugs his shoulders when he’s hoping someone else will tell him how to fix things; he’s learning Sasha does it when he’s sure they won’t. He frowns at the menu pinned to the misty glass, and then perks up. “My father wanted to be sure I knew traditional dance first, so, when they say I can go there it’s not so bad. Mostly the Army is so boring. ‘Don’t sing in barracks, Sasha. Don’t smoke, Sasha. Don’t fight him even if he says’…well. The hazing is bad. I’m big enough most don’t bother, but for the little ones….But once they transfer me, the dancing, that’s okay. I know all the old music from home and the pop songs are fun. The steps are different, some jumps, but I’m strong enough already to get through them.”

“Did you want to?” Alex asks.

“I want dumplings,” Sasha announces, so they turn right. He’s had them here before, but his eyelashes flutter closed biting in like it’s the first time. Alex can’t think what he’ll do when he runs out of new things in America to show Sasha, when he’s useless, but he feels useless already, and at the same time like Sasha will never think so.

“I wanted this,” Sasha says between contemplative dumplings. Alex doesn’t know if he means the food, the role, the quiet in their booth between them, the snow outside the window turning to a storm. But Alex smiles when Sasha looks up, because Alex always finds himself smiling at him, and Alex accepts the last dumpling when he pokes it over.

For the first time since Alex has known Sergei, Alex notices that he looks tired.He’s still there to open the theater every morning, there with the ghost light after Alex leaves at night, but Alex has been bruising his feet against the floor trying to recreate the power of Sergei’s interpretation of the role before he realizes Sergei doesn’t have any.

They’re staging the version where Siegfried dies at the end, so while Alex personally approves of that if the prince can’t remember who he loves for a whole night, he could use the help not to look like he’s a little bit happy. He gives up on his studio time and wanders through the dressing rooms, looking for Sasha to tell him where to find Sergei, but he doesn’t hear Sasha’s belling laughter around any corner.

He bumps into a couple members of the corps, who give him wide-eyed looks and not a lot of help until Jane Beagle’s coming up the stairs from Costumes with an armful of Romantic tutus. She works a hand out from all the tulle to jerk a thumb back towards the smaller studios and tell him a number, but she doesn’t answer when he calls back to doublecheck which of them she’s pointing him to.

Ballet doesn’t need much of a story, but ‘Understudies Get Along’ isn’t enough. Alex might have listened to what wasn’t being said about him and Sasha and realized there must be another story keeping everyone’s attention. If in his more private moments, usually while trying to nap or in the shower, Sasha’s fierce ballet has made Alex think of Nureyev, Alex could have put together that Sergei is Fonteyn.

When Alex stops at the practice room door to peek through the glass, Sasha is sitting on the floor as usual, supervising while Sergei dithers about between the mirrors, not speaking but screaming some kind of tension with his hands. He crosses once, twice, a third time, and Alex thinks by now he can tell by the shape of Sasha’s shoulders that he’s saying something to Sergei before Sergei stops at the far end of the room, sets himself, and spins into the final courtroom scene.

Siegfried enters at a run, joyful high jumps and a proud pirouette as he begins to show off what he’s found to the Queen. When he holds out his arms, Sasha pushes off the floor with his hands and bounces up to enter, a few sweet strides before he hits the biting pirouettes of the Black Swan, traveling leg rising and settling like irritable feathers, high arms deceptively smooth. When it falls he only touches once and runs to Sergei.

Sergei catches him, hands set around his waist the same way Alex had, the way Alex has thought about since. But Sasha presses back instead of breathing into the catch, slipping out of Sergei’s fingers to flutter away, toe to toe, rushing and slowing to kick that leg high as if preening, for the audience in the seats and for Siegfried, who can’t resist stepping after the Swan, hands out eager to reassure the wild creature. The Swan lets him think he’s lured her back to center stage, Sergei’s hands hovering over Sasha’s waist before they stroke up his ribs for the little lift.

Sasha’s eyes are closed, arms like wings thrown out above his head. He weighs enough he must be working silently to allow the lift, until Sergei sets him back and falls to his knee at the Swan’s feet, pressing Sasha’s hand to his heart, then his cheek, tender as Sasha standing over him sinks into the Swan’s triumphant deep back bend.

Maybe Alex has been a little hard on Siegfried. If he were offered this so much more easily than it really is, maybe he’d take it. But Sasha and Sergei are already standing and stepping apart, and this time when Sasha flutters eagerly into the air and runs to him, Sergei catches his wrist and guides him into a turn, flaunting the Swan’s beauty before sending Sasha spinning back around the room. Sasha pauses as if for a partner, meeting at center stage and starting to bow to no one before Sergei takes his hand again and tossing it aside.

In the cleared space, Sergei stands and settles his shoulders, all the pride Alex hasn’t seen this year burning in his posture. He composes his hands, and starts to tell the familiar story in the language of ballet.

Alex smacks on the door. Both of them look up, and Sasha crosses to turn the CD player off before coming to answer the door.

“You’re not dying or retiring you just want to dance _Rothbart?_” Alex asks.

“Could you keep your voice down, people are practicing,” Sergei says.

Alex continues at a perfectly reasonable volume. “You don’t even want to be principal?”

“No,” Sergei says, peering both ways down the hallway guiltily. “Character dancing is just as important a skill as technical ballet, but I mean no, of course I want my role,” which makes Alex screech in disbelief and Sasha’s head snap back, offended. “Sanka, you’re good with him, can you make him stop?”

“No,” Sasha says.

Sergei looks at him in obvious surprise at hearing the word out of his mouth. “What?”

Sasha sets his chin mulishly. “If you want it, why don’t you do it?” he demands, and then when Sergei looks to Alex for clarification he growls and stomps off to the barre along the back wall, making his disdain for them clear while still within earshot like any good dancer would.

Alex and Sergei look level at each other.

“You didn’t think I was dying,” Sergei says. “You’re young, but you know that’s not the same as retiring, too.”

Alex shrugs. “You’ve been hating this role,” he says.

“Not as much as you do,” Sergei says, but there are shadows under his eyes and he’s too good a performer not to know he can’t sell this one.

“Maybe he’ll grow on me,” Alex says. “Maybe I’ll suck, I don’t know. Better than a sure bet your Siegfried will. We haven’t contracted anyone for Rothbart yet. Give me the role.”

“Why?” Sergei asks.

“Because I won’t dance with you ever again if you don’t,” Sasha calls from where he’s apparently channeling his inner Olie in the mirror.

“I want it,” Alex says.

Sergei looks at him for a long time, blue eyes clouded. Alex gives him a respectful nod but then looks over Sergei’s shoulder while he’s thinking on it, watching Sasha in the mirror breathe like he’s been working too hard for so long.

“Okay,” Sergei says, throwing up his hands and then catching himself at it and turning his lip in exasperation. “Alexanders, you can have the first solo role this season. Fight among yourselves for it.”

Alex checks the mirror for Sasha, every detail except what matters fading around his focus like colors in a kaliadascope, like it does at the best times on stage or alone with his music. Sasha sticks out his tongue. “Nah,” Alex says. “We can share.”


	2. Notes on Ballet

On Swan Lake:

**Prince Siegfried**, a party boy, is told by his mother that he will have to pick a bride at his birthday ball. He huffs off to go hunting by a lake. He sees a swan and is about to shoot when she transforms into a young woman, **Odette**. Odette announces she’s been cursed by the evil sorcerer **Rothbart.** The curse can only be broken if someone who’s never loved before swears to love her forever. Siegfried offers to kill Rothbart, and then to try the relationship thing.

She re-birds and Siegfried returns to the palace for the ball. Rothbart presents **Odile**, whose deliberately confusing name I definitely didn’t fuck up somewhere in this fic, dressed as a sexier Oddette. The plan that depends on Siegfried being a player goes like you’d think, and he declares his love to Odile. Some people die, depending on the production.

On roles:

Siegfried is danced by the company’s **principal danseur** (dude dancer). Some productions (including Nureyev’s choreography) dig into him as a tragically naive character who fails his romantic ideals, but Alex is very literalist and very loyal, and would hate him.

Odette/Odile are conventionally both danced by the **principal danseuse** (lady dancer), but some productions fuck around with this. Odile might be the most commonly genderbent character in the ballet canon. As the “other”/forbidden/sensual figure who draws the leads away from the mandated order, she reflects many queer-coded characters and can be kind of a touchstone character for queer dancers.

Rothbart is danced by the company’s **character dancer**. The oldest and most specialized member of the company, the character dancer might not be able to perform the athletic feats of the principals anymore, but is seen as the sage of ballet’s traditions. They tell the audience the story through **ballet language**, a traditional code of hand gestures and expressions.

On dancers:

Rudolf Nureyev is maybe the greatest danseur in history, and a bisexual icon. A magnetic physical force and stormy emotional mystery, he made Americans in the mid 20th century think ballet was sexy again, and became the archetype of the Soviet athlete in the West.

He partnered Margot Fonteyn, one of the last _prima ballerinas, _who had already retired in her mid 40s but returned to the stage for his debut. Despite the 19 year age difference, everyone agrees they brought out the best in each other and nobody knows if they fucked.

Nureyev once said, "At the end of _Lac des Cygnes _(Swan Lake), when she left the stage in her great white tutu I would have followed her to the end of the world." If you'd like to write fanfic about it, please @ me.

On Russian dance:

The Alexandrov Ensemble of the Russian Army (aka the Red Army Choir) is the official army band and dancers of the Russian Army. They have to do splits in full uniform and wear boots like this:

For anyone who doesn’t know them, this famous clip of Russian dance is [the Alexandrov performing cossack dance.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0fTVnhg7S0) But my favorite cossack dance is the Ukrainian National Ensemble, [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCSwNemBK4) The first dancer in red is very Sasha!

On handwork:

Handwork like ballet language is a very traditional element of ballet that often doesn’t get much emphasis among athletic younger dancers. The ‘standard’ hand position that you’d recognize from ballerina figurines or any other art about ballet, where the first and fourth finger are raised and the others gently rounded, can be described as arrondi (rounded). If you flick your fingers out straighter and sharper, it’s allongé.

In Russian and Central Asian dance traditions, you hold you hands in fists. If you watch Yuri on Ice, my favorite detail is that the character Otabek always performs with his hands in fists or allongé for Drama, showing he’s trained in this tradition instead of ballet like the others.


End file.
